Social Impact

MCE is committed to delivering and measuring impact, with a special focus across its portfolio on:

People Living in Poverty

Women Entrepreneurs

People Living in Rural Communities

Health and Education Programs

Microfinance Institutions

More than 2 billion people lack access to formal financial services, including savings accounts, insurance, and loans. Over the last two decades, microfinance has helped fill this gap by delivering credit and other financial services to low-income people around the world.

While microfinance by itself might not eliminate poverty, it is a critical tactic among many tackling an immense challenge. As studies show, microfinance helps people build assets, manage risks and unpredictable income, and gain the freedom to decide how to make and spend money.

As part of its due diligence process, MCE investigates an organization’s commitment to (1) a social mission, (2) transparent and responsible pricing, (3) prevention of over-indebtedness, (4) privacy of borrower information, and (5) fair and respectful treatment of employees and clients.

Since 2006, MCE has disbursed more than $109 million in loans to microfinance institutions that have, in turn, made more than 400,000 loans totaling $180 million to hundreds of thousands of hard-working entrepreneurs.

Each loan recipient (more than 71% of whom are women) supports an average of five family members, and as a result MCE’s loans have helped more than 1.9 million people in 35+ developing countries.

Small and Growing Businesses

Nearly 50% of small and growing businesses (SGBs) in the developing world lack access to appropriate financing, despite constituting a dominant form of job creation and entrepreneurial activity. Even when loans for SGBs are available, interest rates often exceed 20%. Most institutional lenders are also rarely nimble enough to customize their loans to a SGB’s specific business needs.

To address this market failure, MCE’s SGB Fund provides loans on flexible, customized terms and at affordable interest rates to SGBs in Sub-Saharan Africa and other challenging areas of the world.

Because the market gap is particularly devastating for women—for instance, 70% of women-owned SGBs globally are not served or are under-served by financial institutions—MCE gives priority to SGBs that are women-led, include a majority of women in a supply chain, specifically develop products or services for women, employ a majority of women, and/or have a majority of direct clients who are women.

MCE operates its SGB Fund in partnership with USAID’s Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) Initiative, which is contributing $1 million to MCE to catalyze private-sector investment into early-stage enterprises and identify innovative models or approaches that help entrepreneurs bridge the pioneer gap.